Fig. 1.

Schematic representation of all potential reassortants resulting from the co-infection of a cell by two hypothetical parental hantaviruses a (blue) and b (red). Envelope color corresponds to the color of the encoding M segment. S, M, and L capital letters stand for the S, M, and L genomic segments. Subscripted A and B indicate origin of the given segment to one of the two parents. The reassortants generated in the in vitro experiments and also most frequently found among the naturally occurring reassortants are marked by grey background. “Diploid” viruses containing both parental versions of at least one segment were transiently observed in the in vitro experiments. Four examples out of the 13 possible “diploid” patterns are shown in the bottom part of the figure